In Doubt We Trust

Collectively composed by Kai Fagaschinski and Michael Thieke, 2015-2017
Recorded by Michael at ausland, Berlin, August 22nd to 24th, 2017
Mixed by Michael Thieke and Kai Fagaschinski, September and October 2017
Mastered by Werner Dafeldecker in Berlin, November 2017
Cover designed by tanabemse
Supported by ske/austro mechana
Thanks to ausland, tanabemse, Roy, Hanna, Conrad, Dieter, Billy and Werner.

Point of Departure
Over the course of 18 years and five recordings, Kai Fagaschinski and Michael Thieke have honed their approach as a self-described “psycho-acoustic” clarinet duo. Coming out of an immersive group of improvised musicians in Berlin, the two gradually moved their duo music toward a process of collective composition, utilizing their deep immersion into the sonic interactions of two clarinets. (Which is not to say that the two abandoned improvisation as both have continued to play in improvised settings outside of their duo.) From their first release, their music has incorporated lyricism within the complexities of partial tones, and used songlike durations for pieces without touching on song structures, depending upon a technical acumen without hinting at sheer technicality. There is an assured focus distilled from careful listening in their pieces that comes out immediately. What sets In Doubt We Trust off from their previous releases is their decision to develop a single extended 37-minute composition rather than building the CD from shorter pieces.
The cover credits the piece as having been developed over the course of 2015-2017 and one can hear a considered, gradually evolving sensibility at play. Tones are carefully chosen and played off of each other, harmonies develop and are then subverted into quavering atonality, textural crinkles and pops contrast with sections of abstracted lyricism. What holds it all together is an unhurried patience to lay out kernels of ideas and sit on them, letting them organically morph and modulate. What is striking throughout is how the two lay bare the workings of the piece. Breath, the clicks of keys, the sibilant sounds of wind resonating through the body of the clarinet are as elemental to this music as fully articulated notes and ephemeral, looped melodic snippets.
The two are masters at playing their instruments off of each other, mining the beatings and quavering, tightly voiced microtonalities. It is also intriguing to hear how the two have absorbed and co-opted the sounds and timbres of analog circuits and glitched electronics into their vocabulary. Burred, breathy reed tones transform into the even oscillations of a sine tone and then back again. There is a section 30 minutes in where clicks, key-pop clatter, clipped notes and interrupted phrasing bring to mind the sound of a failing hard drive. As strong as their previous releases have been, “In Doubt We Trust” is a masterful development in the contemplative, collective creativity of the duo.
by Michael Rosenstein (USA, 06/2018)

The Sound Projector
Jellyfish, loggerhead turtles and squid… these sea creatures are employed as visual motifs for the deep-diving grace of The International Nothing’s first release in four years. Their last, leather-winged full-length flapped past in 2014, with just a guest appearance (for skeletal troubador Seamus Cater) and an augmented lineup in 2016 to tide us over, but otherwise maintaining their leap-year release rate. Sounding like a pair of tone generators, these two clarinetists install their industrial capacity lungs in separate stereo channels from which they sedate our nervous systems with endless patience. Until today, this took place in brief measures, but on In Doubt We Trust they ‘go epic’ and subsume their poppier tendencies into a streamlined, 37-minute beast that slouches towards Berlin to be born. Unlike so many other ‘X years in the making’ boasts, this entails a palpably deeper descent into binaural acoustics and a seemingly effortless, cetacean impression of interweaving sine waves; a format that bears out their claims to have tapped into ‘new and unheard acoustic scenarios’, and even at coolest seabed level there’s a deep, calming warmth for the week-worn nerves.
by Stuart Marshall (UK, 06/2018)

exclaim!
Haunting minimalism is a specialty of Berlin-based psycho-acoustic clarinet duo the International Nothing. But on In Doubt We Trust, Michael Thieke and Kai Fagaschinski expand and deepen their expressiveness in this 38-minute single-movement extended piece.
Founded in 2000, the duo have researched the timbral resources of their instrument and incorporated them into their sensitive and restrained improvisational work. However, on their new release, they have opted for a through-composed framework wherein the results of years of meticulous exploration and discovery are thoughtfully deployed.
Clarinets panned left (Thieke) and right (Fagaschinski), their combined sounds are sonic equivalent of Mr. Spock’s Vulcan Mind Meld. The breath of one begins the muted microtonal oscillations of the other. A held, darkened tone flowers into its multi-phonic correlative, which pulses and cedes, flowing into a series of variations, each an unexpected and unique mirror image of its origin. Beat frequencies throb and glow with an eerie life force. Two pitches produce a third “ghost” difference tone that leaves the listener questioning where it’s coming from: an auditory “hallucination.” The Nothing’s recording will reward repeated close listening, but can work as an enveloping musical cocoon to wrap around one’s mind when some non-directional thinking fits the mood.
by Glen Hall (Canada, 03/2018)

Chicago Reader
The duo of German clarinetists Kai Fagaschinksi and Michael Thieke create all manner of psychoacoustic effects with acoustic instruments, building a seamless 37-minute piece from long tones, tongue pops, spittle flecks, unpitched breaths, and other extended techniques. They drone, pulse, wiggle, and swarm, pulling apart and coming together, sometimes suggesting electronic feedback, and generally producing an experience so immersive I’m bummed when it ends.
by Peter Margasak (U.S.A., 06/2018)

Squid’s Ear
I grew up in the house of a classical clarinetist, my father, and I’ve heard the instrument since I was a baby. So little wonder I’m drawn to the music of Kai Fagaschinski and Michael Thieke, two clarinetist working in a distinctly unusual duo setting. It’s not about a peculiarity to find two clarinets together, but the type of music this duo plays draw attentions to their union. Rather than impress the listener with complex instrumental technique, the two compose and perform long-form pieces of slow moving, harmonically rich interaction. They weave slow tones and progressions, sometimes in consonance, sometimes letting the harmonic intersections create unusual rhythms of intersticial tones. They overblow on the instrument to create upper register harmonics that ring, and allow the physical sounds of the instrument and their breathing to become part of the music. It’s mysterious, filled with anticipation and tension, feeling like it belongs in the electroacoustic world when in fact their sound comes from one of the oldest orchestral instruments, being used in unanticipated ways.
This is the duo’s fifth album, though you can also hear their approaches in the music of The Magic I.D. and their work with Christof Kurzmann. The previous album, The Power of Negative Thinking on the Monotype label included double bassist Christian Weber and drummer/percussionist Eric Schaefer. Prior to that, their other three albums, all on the Ftarri label, were duo releases, though presenting shorter pieces. This album introduces their longest composition to date, the title track “In Doubt We Trust”, which beautifully unfolds their playing in a gloriously extended form, appropriate to the pacing of their music. So darken your lights, draw your shades, and experience this wonderfully moody and sophisticated album of tone and timbre.
by ??? (U.S.A., 03/2018)

Freejazzblog
For 18 years now The International Nothing, a Berlin-based psycho-acoustic clarinet duo consisting of Michael Thieke and Kai Fagaschinski, have been dealing with silence and how to fill it. John Cage once said that silence was a state of consciousness and that it had nothing to do with the absence of sound in a certain space because there is no such thing as absolute silence. The reason was that we lived in an urban space which was full of sound (even in a dead room we hear the sound of our heartbeat, our blood circulation, our nervous system).
The International Nothing fill this space with their multilayered sound sculptures using multiphonics, beat frequencies, scratching, clapping of the keys, microtonal shifts and dark drones. All these elements are integral parts of their musical syntax.
Both musicians are well known as improvisers in Berlin’s prolific Echtzeit scene, but in this project all you hear is two clarinets (Fagaschinski on the right channel, Thieke on the left) – no overdubs, no electronic manipulation and no improvisation! In Doubt We Trust is a through-composed piece of art.
Additionally, if it comes to sound, dynamics seem to be important to Fagaschinski and Thieke: the pulse of the sounds, the crescendo and decrescendo in the room, the overlapping of voices, volume, timbre, the same notes with a different focus and harmonics. As to the structure the music doesn’t have a real beginning or end, it’s process-like. The composition’s not an object which is the sum of its single parts, it’s a continually moving complex unit.
In Doubt We Trust, a 37:37 pulsating, shivering, quicksilvery wave of muted clarinet noises, creates liquid sound columns, you can hear the breathing, the very nature of the production of music. Just recently a group of scientists found out that bowhead whales serenade each other with improvisations from a vast repertoire of song. The diversity and variability in these songs are rivaled only by a few species of songbirds, their songs are complex musical phrases that are not genetically hard-wired but must be learned. I imagine the sounds of The International Nothing quite close to those of these fantastic animals.
So, close your windows, pull down the shades, imagine you’re under water and experience this wonderful trip of tone and timbre.
by Martin Schray (08/2018)

Vital Weekly
A duo of two clarinet players; that is perhaps something you don’t see every day? Both Kai Fagaschinski and Michael Thieke play one clarinet each and the first is in the right channel, the other left. Over the
years I should think I reviewed some of their releases (Vital Weekly 1041, 939 and 738), so almost everything except their debut from 2006. As a duo they are not interested in playing improvised music but compositions of their own making and for their fourth album (every four years they do one; one was a collaborative release with others and was outside this scheme) they recorded a single track of thirty-seven minutes and the same amount of seconds. They write: ‘no overdubs, no electronic manipulation… and no improvisation”. Hard to believe I would think, as I could swear some of this sounded like electronics, for instance right at the start with some beautifully shimmering mystery tones. I would think that the various separate parts were recorded in various sessions; I counted somewhere around seven to nine individual parts here, and all of it is of some excellent beauty. With The International Nothing space becomes a very important place. It all has to do with how these two clarinets interact with each other, creating microscopic differences between them, and how they travel through the recording space before landing on whatever medium is used to record this. Most of the time it sounds like two clarinets playing long form sounds, long on the sustain, so it sounds like sine waves (hence perhaps my initial thought of this as ‘electronic’, from time to time), but right in the middle there is also a piece for crackling of plastic, perhaps upon the surface of the instruments. Both players play almost the same thing and it would take some very close headphone listening to find out what the differences are between the left and the right channel; I would think very little difference, as both of these are highly accomplished players and I would think they rehearsed their piece very well. This is truly beautiful piece of music!
by Frans de Waard (Netherlands, 02/2018)

Chain D.L.K.
I already talked about this Berlin-based project founded by psycho-acoustic clarinet players Michael Thieke and Kai Fagaschinski almost twenty years ago on the occasion of the release of the nicely titled (and performed) “The Power Of Negative Thinking” on Monotype. Besides showing an appreciable wit in the choice of titles, “In Doubt We Trust” features a format that someone would label as ‘epic’: no more snippets or short tracks, but just one long-lasting (37 minutes and 37 seconds) track, that follow the same publishing periodicity (they highlighted the fact that The International Nothing drop an album out on the Japanese label Ftarri every four years). Even if it’s one single track, “In Doubt We Trust” can be ideally detached into different moments: one of the watersheds of their tonal experimental streams – the whole record got based on almost three years of psychoacoustic research – occurs for instance around the 15th minute, where they play with muted tones and salivation after a crescendo of experiments where they almost reach cacophonous dissonances. They mostly focus on so-called Tartini effect, an aural illusion caused by the combination of two different tones of a similar source: the two players “placed” themselves on the two pans (Kai on the right, Michael on the left) and the combination of the tones they play on the two sides of the listeners renders a sort of ghost tone, a third one that comes from their juxtaposition (you can try listening to the same snippet by balancing the pan of your mixer before playing them simultaneously). The effect is so well exploited that the listener can interpret the title of this record, as a reference to a doubt which sounds more reasonable than the one about the existence of some God that these players cast: is this third tone a ghost tone or a real one? Have a listen to try answering to this puzzling question…
by Vito Camarretta (USA, 05/2018)

Connor Kurtz Music
I’ll admit that I’ve never been much of a fan of the German clarinet duo The International Nothing. Their music is weird, minimal, and abstract. They straddled a thin line between dead-serious contemporary experimentation and odd ironic humour – it was never something I could make any sense of. Despite all of that, I’ve always made time to listen to anything the group released. It was clear to me that The International Nothing were working with something special and unique, even if I couldn’t pin down exactly what that was. I’m glad that I kept on listening, because In Doubt We Trust, the group’s fifth album in 12 years, is fantastic.
In Doubt We Trust doesn’t represent a massive change of sound for the band, just a change of thought. For those unfamiliar with the project, The International Nothing is the duo of Kai Fagaschinski and Michael Thieke. The two musicians are equipped with nothing more than clarinets – Fagaschinski plays on the right channel, and Thieke on the left (and this has been true for all of their work, including their work within the avant-pop quartet The Magic I.D.). Although Fagaschinski and Thieke are likely best known as improvisers, in The International Nothing they play their own (predictably minimal) compositions. For the majority of their albums’ durations, the duo can typically be found exchanging soft repetitive tones and crafting bizarre resonating harmonies. At other times they’ll be investigating extended techniques which are too complicated to adequately explain with words.
All previous International Nothing albums have included multiple tracks, ranging from 6 to 8. In Doubt We Trust is a single 37-minute piece. Although this may not seem like a big deal, this plays a huge role in why I so much prefer this album. On the old albums, the tracks felt like sketches. Each song was an exploration a couple of fairly simple ideas, which they’d flesh out for five to ten minutes. The format lent itself to having plenty of interesting moments, but it also resulted in albums with plenty of unnecessary repetitions of ideas and little in the way of cohesion. On In Doubt We Trust, things don’t truly work so differently. The piece is essentially just a series of short songs, edited together end-to-end. Regardless of how the work was actually created though, it flows beautifully, resembling movements in a symphony instead of independent pieces thrown together to make an album.
In addition to the album’s incredible flow, it also seems to have much more focus on atmosphere and the emotions that it may result in than the duo’s other releases. I’d hesitate to call it an emotional album, but there’s certainly something uncanny about its ambiance. The harmonies that the duo constructs are odder than ever. They aren’t overly dissonant, but they’re rarely traditionally beautiful either. I guess they’re just, well, odd. What it reminds me most of is illogical harmonies, the German duo of violinist Johnny Chang and bassist Mike Majkowski (who some might remember from their wonderful 2016 debut on Another Timbre, Volume). On that record, illogical harmonies created exactly what the title suggests, using a process which relied on improvisation and transcription. Both The International Nothing and illogical harmonies clearly have a strong grasp of how harmonies work and how they affect their listeners – and they both choose to subvert it in their own ways. It results in a unique, but uncomfortable, experience. The music almost feels like classical music from a different world, where the laws of harmony and sound are completely different.
During many moments on the album, Fagaschinski and Thieke are performing nearly identical lines. It may seem redundant at times, or overly simple, but it’s that “nearly” which makes these moments so enchanting. Sometimes one clarinet will come in slightly late, or hold onto a note for slightly longer, or apply a different modulation. When there’s two sounds being heard that are completely different, the brain can easily and comfortably differentiate the two sounds. However, when the sounds are just slightly different, the brain’s concentration feels more complicated. We hear the common note being played, and we can absorb that, but we become very attracted to that slight difference. It’s in that slight difference where some of The International Nothing’s greatest strengths reside.
The album has some sparse melodic moments as well, which is something that they’ve always experimented with. It probably goes without saying that the melodies that the duo stirs are up are completely weird and will supply the listeners with a gut feeling of “this is all wrong”. And that’s true, they are all wrong, but they do somehow fit in inside the world of this weird, awkward album. And interestingly, I found that after several listens these melodies have even become affecting, and moving, in a very alien way. There’s a moment towards the end of the piece where a simple melody, which may otherwise seem lovely, is slowed to a snail’s pace and dissected. It will never not feel off, but once a listener becomes comfortable with the musical world of The International Nothing moments like this begin to make sense, even feeling genuine and powerful.
Before I wrap up, there is one last particular moment I’d like to mention, which occurs at approximately the halfway point and last for 5 minutes. Fagaschinski performs in some bizarre technique that sounds a lot more like scrunching newspapers than a clarinet. Thieke begins to play soft notes and louder squeaks. The moment is so completely odd and nonsensical, especially when sandwiched in-between two of the piece’s most listenable and harmonic sections. To me, it works as a bit of a breather, or a palette cleanser. It gives me very little to think about, and even feels relaxing in its own way. I single out this section, because I think it creates a good reference for what this album is all about. In Doubt We Trust is all about creating a musical world which is very different from ours – and that’s the kind of world where the sounds of crackling, squeaks and pops can operate as a refresher in a clarinet duo performance.
In Doubt We Trust is so much more than just weird, though. The International Nothing has assembled something multi-faceted, otherworldly, and intriguing. The performances, which I’ve barely mentioned, are phenomenal; there are very few other instrumentalists who play their instruments like these two do. Whether you can understand In Doubt We Trust or not, I think most experimental music fans will be able to recognize it as something special; and I’ll vouch for it never having a dull moment.
by Connor Kurtz (Canada, 03/2018)

Nitestylez
The Berlin-based psycho acoustic clarinet duo that is The International Nothing, still consisting of its founding members Michale Thieke and Kai Fagaschinski, is back with a new album on the Ftarri-imprint which has been their home from early on. Consisting of one monolithic track of approx. 38 minutes length “In Doubt We Trust” caters an absolutely fascinating interplay of the two musicians creating an a timeless, slowly moving outerdimensional stream of sonic events that lets one easily forget about its origin, about being created by real instruments, only by its calm, ever flowing nature alone, its deep, agravic and subaquatic feel that sees The International Nothing carving out a very own and unique niche within the realm of intense Ambient and Deep Listening Music for sure. Absolutely stunning and truly time dissolving for a reason.
by baze.djunkiii (Germany, 02/2018)